The world of the internet job placement sites continues to grow rapidly in 2014. With so many job placement sites, which is the right one for a job seeker in California to use?
To get perspective we might turn to Matt Hendrickson, CEO of Ascendify (www.ascendify.com), and one of California’s leading internet entrepreneurs in job placement.
In 1992, Matt launched ResumeMaker, aimed at helping individuals to develop resumes online. ResumeMaker grew to millions in annual sales and was a #1 best seller for over 15 years. In 2011, Matt launched Ascendify to help companies attract and select talent.
Ascendify works with employers to help them manage the hiring process, including through its “talent communities”, by which job seekers can connect with employers and engage in ongoing discussion of job opportunities. Today, Ascendify, based in downtown San Francisco, is growing rapidly and expanding to work with employers in other countries.
Though Ascendify’s clients are employers, Matt researches and analyzes the use of sites for job seekers. He notes that today job seekers are faced with hundreds of choices, with more being added regularly. The first phase of job placement sites, the largely static job boards such as Monster and CareerBuilder, evolved slowly. In the past five years, the pace of internet placement site change has accelerated, with a wide variety of new tools being offered.
So what does he recommend? Matt offers the following four recommendations for sorting through the hundreds of job placement sites.
- Start with the Aggregators, Indeed and SimplyHired. The mega job boards, Indeed.com and SimplyHired.com are sometimes dismissed by job counselors as impersonal and overwhelming. However, Matt sees these aggregators as good starting points for almost any job search. They gather jobs from numerous sites, and also sort these jobs by location, occupation and sector. Indeed allows for uploading of a resume.
- Utilize niche sites, such as nurse.com and allretailjobs.com: Beyond the aggregators, Matt recommends the niche sites for occupations. He has hired software engineers from Hired.com, and recommends it and other sites, such as Nurse.com, Allretailjobs.com and Dice.com for occupational specialties.
- Utilize internship sites, both for internships and re-entry into the labor market, as well as freelance sites to get work and get in the door: Matt also has hired interns through Internships.com, and recommends it as well as other intern sites, both for internships and also for persons interested in re-entry. Other intern sites are Internmatch.com and InternBound.com. Matt recommends freelance sites to get project-based work, both for income and possibly as a way to get in the door. He points to Elance-Odesk and TaskRabbit.
- Referrals are more important than ever, especially from current employees of a company: Matt emphasizes that referrals are more important than ever. He urges job seekers: research companies that you’d like to work for and see how you are connected to people that work there; ask for a referral. As part of the hiring system it builds for employers, Ascendify encourages referrals from existing employees. Among companies that utilize the Ascendify system, he estimates that nearly 50% of hires come from referrals
Matt offers two further observations of the job placement sites in 2015. First, the internet placement system is rapidly moving to a mobile platform. Matt estimates that 30%-40% of job seekers now do job search primarily from a mobile platform. Second, Matt notes that low tech or non-tech networks of family and friends, far from decreasing in importance in this internet age, are more important than ever.